THE OLD Sunday Sun Magazine, the brown section as we called it, was a beloved Baltimore publication. On those sepia-toned pages nearly 50 years ago, I spotted the occasional photographs of James P. Gallagher, a local photographer-home builder-stockbroker who died a week ago today. In the 1950s, Jim was shooting the classic pictures of steam locomotives, old trestles and battered stations - and loving it.

Years later I got to know him. It was a curious friendship.

Like so many Baltimoreans, it turns out our lives were interconnected. Jim, it happened, was a visitor to the old Guilford Avenue house long before I was born. He was a friend of my uncle Jacques, and my cousins Billy-O and Jim O'Hare. He was also the photographer at the Loyola College Greyhound when my father, Joe Kelly, was its editor. And for many years they were Loyola basketball fans.

Jim certainly came by his gift of artistry naturally. Generations of his family had built beautiful Baltimore rowhouses. They put up grand palaces on upper Eutaw Place in Reservoir Hill, blocks in East Baltimore and along Maryland Avenue in Charles Village. They built an entire neighborhood named Ednor Gardens near the old stadium.

As anyone knows who has owned a Gallagher home, they are built to high standards - and had an artistic quality. One of Jim's people donated a substantial collection of paintings to the Baltimore Museum of Art.

The best of Jim's photographs were haunting compositions. As a child I cut them out of the newspaper and pasted them in my scrapbook. Years later, my mother surprised me with his masterpiece, a dreamy silhouette of steam locomotive, tender, box car and caboose riding over a Harford County trestle. The picture seemed to win every prize in the country - and should have.

Jim's daughter, Karen, told me they didn't take traditional family vacations in the 1950s, when Jim was snapping away. No, the Gallaghers went to Relay, on the Patapsco River, and waited for B&O; trains to pass. Jim stood alongside the tracks, with his camera in hand. On another occasion, he was nearly killed by a steam locomotive in Cecil County. Well, he took chances.

Jim was a most generous, unpretentious person. He'd lend or give away prints of his stuff to anyone who showed an interest. So, when I was compiling a book on Maryland photographers, I called at his door, then in the Robert Garrett Building on Redwood Street. As we talked I realized that here was a standout Maryland photographer whose work needed to be fully recognized. He was a master, whose stuff was stored away in shoe boxes, I believe, in his mother's house, where it brought no pleasure to anyone.

(He also had the gift of wearing out an editor's patience. He had an enthusiasm for steam trains that included repetitious phone calls about his work. One prominent newspaper chief got fed up and banned him from his publication.)

But that was years ago. In the 1980s he produced a box of aging negatives that made me draw a breath. There were hundreds of knockout black-and-white photos from a classic period of American railroading, the days when steam was being replaced by the first generation of diesels.

We went to work. I started writing some text and captions. Jim was a good collaborator, but he had his secrets. I could never tell how many more photos he had in secret storage. I still don't. After the book we produced, Trackside Maryland, was published, he came up with more photographs that I wished we'd had for the book. But that was Jim's way.